My Top 10 Films of 2007

I started putting together a list of my Top Ten films over Christmas - around about the time I did my list of favourite gigs - but I had to put it to one side to do some overdue research on my forthcoming novel about procrastination.

I've been quite stringent here. I'm only including films that had a UK theatrical release between January 1st and December 31st 2007. This means that there are plenty of great films from the tail-end of 2006 that I saw for the first time in 2007 that can't be included in this list. I'm sure the makers of The Prestige and Children of Men will be devastated by this. Oh, well.

I'm very fickle with stuff like this. I like to convince myself that this is because artistic judgments are, by their very nature, ongoing processes subject to perceptual re-evaluation. I might even claim that my shifting sands of perception are due to the fact that I am a verb and not a noun. The sad truth, though, is that I'm fickle with stuff like this because I'm fickle. If you asked me again tomorrow I'd probably give you a very different list.

Here's how I feel right now:


10. Beowulf (in Gob-Smackingly Glorious 3D!!!)
We're all allowed guilty pleasures, and this one's mine. I thought it was visually breathtaking and tremendous fun, a Frazetta portfolio brought to life and set loose on an unsuspecting crowd of popcorn-chompers. Not everyone agrees with this, of course. In some quarters - even amongst some of my friends - disparaging comments have made about this film. Phrases like "crass" and "noisy" and "CGI wankfest" have been uttered, but I don't care. They can leave Beowulf off their Top 10s. This is my list: I say who gets in.

I wrote about it here and here.

9. 28 Weeks Later
I like to think that over the years I've developed an natural immunity to the horror genre, but this film proved me wrong by genuinely scaring the blue-bejesus out of me. A superior sequel.


8. 3:10 To Yuma
I love Westerns, I do. I was raised on them. Despite the fact the genre's obits were written-up decades ago, 2007 saw the release of two high-profile Westerns, namely, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and 3:10 To Yuma. I haven't seen the former yet (otherwise I suspect it would have featured prominently in my Top 10), but I did see 3:10 To Yuma and loved it to bits.

A remake of a half Century-old Glenn Ford flick (which was based on a short story by the mighty Elmore Leonard), it was helmed by the somewhat dodgy euphemistic-sounding director James Mangold and starred Russell Crowe and Christian Bale. It was refreshingly old-school in its storytelling. A far cry from the post-Leone/Peckinpah Revisionist take on the genre, it was more in the tradition of John Ford and Howard Hawkes and featured meaty-yet-nuanced performances from its leads.

While I expect nothing less of Bale, Crowe's performance was less a revelation than a reminder of what I liked about him in the first place. His every glance, gesture and movement seemed to capture, channel and convey the classic, archetypal Western anti-hero. I'd go as far as to say that Crowe's Ben Wade might have earned himself a barstool in the Eternal Saloon alongside the likes of Eastwood's Josey Wales and The Duke's Ethan Edwards.


7. The Bourne Ultimatum
In my humble opinion, The summer blockbuster of this year from The action film franchise of the decade. Kinetic, smart and slyly subversive.


6. The Darjeeling Limited/Hotel Chevalier
Wes Anderson is one of those filmmakers who seem to polarise audiences. Some people love his self-consciously quirky, stylised tales of dysfunctional oddballs. Other people hate his self-consciously quirky, stylised tales of dysfunctional oddballs. I fall into the former camp, but those in the latter camp would probably dismiss me as a self-consciously quirky, stylised, dysfunctional oddball.

While not quite up there with 2004s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou - his masterly splicing of the life of Jacques Cousteau with the cult 80s oddity The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai - this tale of three estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Adrien Brody) embarking on a train journey of heavily-medicated reconciliation across India was a welcome despatch from Wes World.

Special mention should go to Hotel Chevalier, the short film that accompanied - and acted as a sort-of prologue to - The Darjeeling Limited. A lovely little whimsical gem that probably deserves an entry of it's own.


5. The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's directorial debut is a mesmerising, meticulously crafted thriller set during the final years of Communist-rule in East Germany. It's 1984 (appropriately enough) and a loyal, methodical, unambitious Captain of the Secret Police or Stasi (the late Ulrich Mühe) finds redemption and reconnects with his humanity while carrying out a surveillance operation on a playwright and his actress lover (Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck).

Utterly, utterly brilliant - and if the final, devastating coda doesn't make you gulp, sob or bawl your eyes out then you really are a hard-hearted bastard.

I hear a Hollywood remake is in the works. For some reason, when I think of the casting of the central character the name "Tom Hanks" comes to mind, but I might be wrong. Let's hope so, huh? Watch the original now so you can annoy people later on by saying: "It's not as good as the original, you know." That's what I plan to do.


4. Hot Fuzz
I was a fan of Spaced. I was a fan of Shawn of the Dead. Now I'm a fan of Hot Fuzz.

It's as simple as that.


3. Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne)
Director Guillaume Canet proves that no one does Hitchcockian suspense quite like wot the French do. In this taut and twisty psychological thriller, paediatrician Alex Beck's wife is brutally murdered and he is left for dead. After a three month coma he awakens to find he's the prime suspect. The charges are eventually dropped, eight years' go by but he's still grieves for his wife. Then an email arrives that seems to prove she's still alive...

A great story brilliantly told - with faultless performances from François Cluzet, Marie-Josée Croze and the always-dependable Jean Rochefort - make this an instant classic. The fat old misogynist from Leytonstone must be rubbing his hands with glee.


2. The Fountain

Darren Aronovsky's follow-up to his mindfuck masterpiece Requiem For A Dream (2000) wasn't everyone's cup of tea. The fact that it had about a lunchbreak's worth of screentime at my local multiplex seems to confirm this. Maybe this was due to the fact that genre-breaking meditations on love, loss and duty rarely appease the popcorn-munching masses. Or perhaps it was on account of the film's unorthodox narrative structure, which featured three interwoven plotlines spanning a thousand years.

I suspect, though, that the real reason for the film's meagre bum-to-seat ratio was because it featured Hugh Jackman travelling through through the cosmos inside a big glass bubble, with a tree. Some people can't get their heads around stuff like that.

Fuck 'em, I say.


1. Zodiac
After the misstep that was Panic Room, the news that David Fincher would be returning to the world of serial killers generated a sizzle of anticipation amongst moviegoers, cinéastes and Birmingham-based, blather-prone Irishmen alike. This, after all, was the genre in which he made his reputation. Zodiac, though, is more than just a re-tread or sequel-of-sorts to Se7en ("Ei8ht"?). It’s a different beast altogether. Based on the true story of the hunt for San Francisco's notoriously elusive Zodiac serial killer (the real-life inspiration behind Dirty Harry's fictional nemesis 'Scorpio'), Zodiac is a methodically researched, meticulously-crafted, perfectly cast procedural drama. On another level, though - and there are many, many levels to this film – it’s a compelling character study of three men obsessed with finding the truth. The film’s three main protagonists - cartoonist Jake Gyllenhaal, cop Mark Ruffalo and crime reporter Robert Downey Jr - make for an unlikely triumvirate, but they’re drawn together by a common obsession which – over the decades – takes its toll on them in different and sometimes tragic ways.

Film critic Roger Ebert called it the "'All The Presidents Men' of serial killer movies”, and the mood, themes and grown-up storytelling - as well as the bewildering abundance of clues, counter-clues and Goddamn misdirections - certainly reminded me of the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman classic. In fact, Fincher’s meticulous attention to period and personal detail is so authentic and evocative you could be forgiven for thinking that you’ve stumbled across some lost classic of early-1970s Hollywood.

Whoever said “They don’t make them like that anymore?” might want to think again.

To be or not 3D

I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been to see Beowulf at the cinema and enjoyed it tremendously. I didn't get around to saying why I enjoyed it tremendously, but that's because I was interrupted by a phone call. These things happen.

I thought Beowulf was a grand, bold and jaw-droppingly magnificent piece of classic heroic fiction that was epic in every sense of the word. There, that wasn't so difficult. It was a guilty pleasure of a movie that reminded me of why I fell in love with cinema in the first place. Sorry, Rol.

It certainly broke new ground in terms of visual storytelling, but I felt that this was one of those rare occasions where eye-popping CG trickery didn't disguise a weak plot and shonky characterisation but heightened the mood and served the story. Kudos to Messrs Zemeckis, Gaiman & Avary for pulling it off.

Just to clarify matters and put things into perspective, I don't think Beowulf was the best film I've ever seen. It's not as good as - say - Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Breathless, Yojimbo, Luis Bunuel's Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie or Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. But it was certainly the best film I saw last Sunday night.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I saw the 3D version of the film. I hadn't seen a 3D movie since I was a kid, and was somewhat gobsmacked by the advances made in this technology. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but on a couple of occasions I instinctively ducked for fear of getting my eye poked out by a digitally-rendered spear. I'd like to think that this conveys the eye-popping effectiveness of the technique, but I suspect it probably displays the feeble-minded gullibility of my brain. In any case, it probably makes me look like a member of that legendarily dumb Lumiere Brothers' cinema audience who panicked at the sight of an advancing train.

Let's be clear about something, though: 3D films are a gimmick. In fact, they're one of the oldest gimmicks in the book. Before the film started there were trailers for a remake of Journey to the Centre of the Earth [in 3D] and a re-release of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas [also in 3D - yay!], so it looks as though this particular gimmick is about to make something of a comeback.

Which is fairly interesting, to me at least. When 3D movies were first introduced in the 1950s- along with CinemaScope, Cinerama, Scratch-O-Rama and a veritable plethora of audio-visual snake oil - it was at a time when cinemas were losing vast chunks of their market share to a troublesome upstart medium called television. Hollywood film studios and cinema chains feared for their future and were desperate to find new ways of delaying their impending Ragnarok and of getting bums back on seats. Now, half a century later, those same industries once again believe they're losing vast chunks of their market share to another upstart medium and are just as desperate to halt and reverse the arse-to-seat attrition. And just as the 1950s studio chiefs and cinema owners tried to find new gimmicky enhancements that couldn't be duplicated on a humble black and white telly from Radio Rentals, their modern day equivalents are digitally-tweaking old gimmicky enhancements that can't be duplicated on a humble laptop screen.

Alphonse Karr knew what he was talking about.

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Beowulf

Tonight I went to the cinema to see Beowulf. It was the 3D version, so I'm currently suffering from a mild bout of sensory overload. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I thrive on sensory overload.

Beowulf - in case you don't already know - is veteran genre director Robert Zemeckis' CG blockbuster adaptation of the classic Old English poem. Featuring a screenplay by the mighty Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and a heavyweight cast of motion-captured semi-synthespians - including Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie - it's already cleaned up at the US box office and looks set to do the same over here. To the best of my knowledge, big-budget movie adaptations of classic poems are a bit of a rarity; top-grossing movie adaptations of classic poems, though, are rarer still. I can only imagine that Hollywood scriptwriters are now strip-mining poetry anthologies for inspiration. Personally, I'd like to see Disney Pixar tackle Philip Larkin's Sunny Prestatyn, or Dreamworks Animation try their hand at at Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus. But that's just me.

Of course, not everyone's going to be happy about this. The other morning, I was listening to a review of the Beowulf film on Radio 4's Today Programme. A guy who had illustrated an edition of Beowulf and an expert on Anglo-Saxon literature dismissed the film as a shallow, migraine-inducing, CGI wankfest. Actually, that wasn't the exact phrase they used. This was, after all, Radio 4's Today Programme. Ever since the Hutton Enquiry they've gone to great lengths to avoid phrases like "wankfest". But that was the gist of it. I believe the Irish poet Tom ["I hated it"] Paulin was talking about it on The Culture Show last night. I can't imagine he gave it a ringing endorsement, though. I imagine he hated it.

Well - with respect to those learned experts in Old English poetry - they can go and kiss my pert wee Irish arse.

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